The £250 challenge: I’d like to thank… oh, nobody

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

The results of the £250 challenge are in. I came last. A lot.

This must be what it’s like when the camera pans to you at the Oscars, a second after the presenter has announced that the idiot with the stupid hair has won the award you craved. Unfortunately, I’m not a Hollywood starlet and, more importantly, I’m not the type to sit and smile and pretend it was the taking part that counts.

I wanted to win, dammit. And not because I’m a bad loser. Which I am. And not because the Goodwill PC deserved to win. Which it did. But because I wanted technology to be about more than baubles and flashing lights and faster bits of metal. I wanted to introduce a little soul to proceedings – not mine, of course, which is currently a seething mass of wronged rage – but somebody’s, hopefully somebody nice than me.

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The £250 Challenge: Vote for the free PC

Monday, March 16th, 2009

I’ll hold my hands up – the free PC I acquired as part of the £250 challenge is ugly. It’s so ugly children can’t actually see it and every adult who’s dared peer in its direction has been driven mad. I wouldn’t be surprised if the devil lived inside. It’s big enough. There’d even be room for Cerberus to have a run around.

I could have delivered it to the office in Noah’s Ark while sharing a beer with Elvis Presley and it wouldn’t have caused more of a stir. People were drawn to it.  They crept from behind their desks and gathered around it with bewildered expressions. I’d like to believe it was because I’d discovered a relic, that my technological archaeology had unearthed an ancient fascination. It was built in 1999 after all. The truth is much simpler. It’s monstrous.

We tend to look at our past with rose coloured spectacles, I’ve done it myself. The Compaq Deskpro was the heel which ground those spectacles into the dirt. As a PC it has no redeeming features. Aside from its cheery ugliness, it’s also big enough to beat a whale to death and has the processing power of a twelve-year-old who’s spent the last hour trying to stick a banana in his ear.

Thankfully, my part of the challenge has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the PC I found. While my colleagues were running around trying to get the best machine they could for £250, my task was to prove you could get one for free. You can. End of story… or at lest, that’s what I thought.

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Zero Hour approaches for my £250 build

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Myself and several of my colleagues are currently taking part in a unique challenge – buying or building a PC for £250 and discovering whether the high street, the internet or building the machine yourself yields the best results.

I’d had thoughts of building a media centre machine, but that plan is, at this point, dead in the water. To get that build into budget I found myself cutting too many corners: reducing the size of the hard disk, settling for an even worse chassis and not being able to include wireless internet, for instance, felt like removing too many crucial features to make it worthwhile.

So, that means my machine will be a good old-fashioned desktop PC, albeit one without a monitor or speakers. My final shopping list has been tweaked, pennies have been shaved off prices, and I’ve spent most of the week calculating delivery charges to work out if I save money by ordering from one site or if I’d be ruined by City Link.

My list of specifications is now complete, though, so you have until early afternoon to try and dissuade me from making a terrible mistake:

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Help me build the Goodwill PC

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Here’s a poser for you… if building a PC for a mere £250 is a challenge (hence the name of the feature) then what is building a PC for absolutely nothing? A labour? A punishment? The wrath of Tim? Whatever it is, I’m going to give it a bash.

Thankfully, I have a couple of weapons at my disposal. The first is an almost alarming lack of dignity that means going cap in hand into the world isn’t going to faze me at all. Couple that with a distinct lack of common sense or taste and you’ve a formidable begging combination. However, my most important weapon is you… I desperately need your help. I need to find legitimate sources of free computing stuff: groups, organisations, tips, anything that will net me something completely free that I can stuff into a case (though I’ll be needing a case, too, thinking of it). Bear in mind, I’m not soliciting free stuff from you. I need to go through the everyday, normal channels that anybody could use if they wanted to do the same thing.

God only knows why I was chosen for this particular task, maybe it was my Ringo Starr accent, or my dress sense which has something of the homeless chic to it I admit, but I absolutely refuse to lose out to my comparatively loaded colleagues.

Goodwill is a powerful thing, and people are generally brilliant if given half a chance. Now let’s see if together they’re powerful enough to build a PC from scratch.

The £250 challenge – let battle commence

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

In the famous words of Lord Kitchener, your country needs you! Well, PC Pro. As of today, five of our writers are beginning their quest to create, buy and barter their way to the best possible £250 PC or laptop.

We’ve charged Darien Graham-Smith with spending £250 on a second-hand machine, we’ll be sending David Fearon to the high street to find his perfect PC (or laptop), while David Bayon will be doing the same but online. (more…)